Early detection of breast cancer and other types of cancer is typically an important factor to successfully treat cancer. However, there are several reasons that, for some cancer patients, the disease is not detected early. One reason is limitations in the performance of screening. For example, women with dense breast tissue have a very high relative risk for developing breast cancer, but mammography (the current standard tool for breast screening) has low sensitivity for detection of cancer in patients with dense breast tissue, which leads to a relatively high false negative rate. In other words, the performance of mammography is typically worse for this high-risk group of women with dense breast tissue. Another reason contributing to later detection of breast cancer is limited participation in breast tissue screening. Lower participation rates in annual mammograms are partly due to limited access to the screening tool (mammograms require specialized medical centers and highly trained staff), fear of radiation, and discomfort. Furthermore, due to the ionizing nature of mammography, the use of mammography is limited in younger women, who would otherwise be at risk of excessive radiation over their lifetime.
Although magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) improves on some of the limitations of mammography by providing relatively comfortable, radiation-free imaging capability, MRI is prohibitively expensive for routine use and also has limited accessibility. Improved detection of cancer would decrease the percentage of breast cancer incidence at later stages. Thus, there is a need in the medical imaging field to create an improved method of characterizing tissue in a patient. This invention provides such an improved method.